T Tyndale’s New Testament

Tyndale’s New Testament

Marlborough’s status as a Church of England school accounts in part for the remarkable range of early Bibles preserved in the Rare Books collection.

One of the most interesting and historically significant is a duodecimo edition of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English, the publication of which has been described as ‘arguably the most important single event in the history of the English Reformation’. The longer legacy of Tyndale’s translation extends beyond its part in that great cultural and intellectual upheaval, because it is now generally recognised as a landmark text in the development of English as a literary language. It is often said that the King James’s translation of the Bible from 1611, also known as the Authorised Version, and the works of Shakespeare stand as the cornerstones of modern literary English. But analysis has shown that James I’s committee of divines who worked upon the 1611 Authorised Version followed 85% of Tyndale’s words, subsuming whole passages from the older translation unacknowledged. Such unofficial recognition of his labours would have struck Tyndale as ironic; for fear of persecution, he had been forced to print his Bibles in great secrecy in Cologne and Worms, and to smuggle the unbound sheets into English ports inside bales of wool – sacred contraband deemed heretical by Henry VIII.

As will be remembered, Tyndale lost his life in 1536 near Brussels, a victim of the sectarian fires that flickered through Reformation Europe. It was not only his body that was consumed by flames: almost every copy of his 1526 first edition of the New Testament met a fiery end in pyres built along Paternoster Row outside St Paul’s Cathedral. So thorough was the book-burning that only three copies of the first edition survived – one now in the library of the new St Paul’s Cathedral, one in the British Library and one in the Prince’s Library in Stuttgart. The College copy comes from the third edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed in 1550. The orders to reprint it came from Henry’s son, Edward VI, a devout Protestant, who licensed the royal printer Richard Jugge to publish several further editions of a book his father had sought to suppress.